Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, and Patriotism by Stephen M. Norris (review)

Film & History 45.1 (Summer 2015) 92 Criticisms aside, Holston’s labor of love has much to recommend it, especially for those who love roadshows. James H. Krukones, John Carroll University Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, and Patriotism Stephen M. Norris. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. $90 cloth, $35 paper. xv, 388 pp. The basic subject of this engaging book is Russian film in the “zero years,” that is, the first decade of the twenty-first century. Following the collapse of the film industry in the 1990s, Russian filmmakers began resorting to American moviemaking techniques—big budgets, gargantuan sets, computer-based special effects, and wall-to-wall action—to create narratives focused on various aspects of the Russian and Soviet past. The result was the Russian “blockbuster,” an often profitable box-office enterprise that tapped into dormant reserves of nationalist feeling while attracting the attention, and sometimes the support, of the Putin government. In other words, what begins as a story about the movies turns into a thoughtprovoking account of contemporary Russia. That story is well told by Stephen Norris, already known for his expertise in interpreting visual history. One of the attractive features of Norris’s book is his largely successful attempt to make each of the chapters a self-standing unit that often centers on a particular film or film genre while also exploring other aspects of Russia’s media culture, including the multiplex and video store. An early chapter, for example, deals with The Barber of Siberia (1998), an expensive epic whose late Imperial setting allowed director Nikita Mikhalkov to craft a valentine to the pre-Soviet era at the same time that he began dabbling in contemporary politics. As described by Norris, the film “provided the script for the patriotic culture of the zero years” (47). Mogul Karen Shakhnazarov likewise mounted large-scale productions set in prerevolutionary times as part of his campaign to rebuild Mosfilm, the mammoth studio that had dominated Soviet filmmaking prior to 1991. Shakhnazarov’s success caused Putin to take film more seriously as a tool of political strategy and, not coincidentally, to open state coffers to Mosfilm. That the producer’s films lionized the battle against terrorism during the tsarist era could not have been lost on a government desperate to generate popular support for its campaign against non-Russian subversives. Filmmakers also dealt more directly with the Soviet period. In 2006, for instance, a miniseries based on Doctor Zhivago sought to capture the true essence of Pasternak’s novel, eschewing the romantic approach of earlier, Western versions and deploying a background score by the estimable Eduard Artem’ev—the “Russian John Williams,” according to Norris (94)—that drew its inspiration from the Orthodox liturgy to create a requiem for the revolution. Filmmakers also returned in earnest to the Second World War, that most formative of Soviet experiences. The new movies, however, included tropes that distinguished them from the war films of the past, depicting Soviet officers as indifferent to the loss of their own troops as well as Germans as fellow victims. The Soviet experience in Afghanistan received blockbuster treatment in Fedor Bondarchuk’s Ninth Company (2005), but the director’s critical approach, which essentially equated Soviet intervention to the earlier U.S. involvement in Vietnam, prompted a video-game response (“The Truth about Ninth Company”) intent on claiming the episode as a victory. Perhaps the most interesting film of the zero years is Aleksei Balabanov’s Cargo 200 (2007)—a rejoinder to the growing nostalgia for the Brezhnev era—that Norris dubs “the bleakest, darkest, most repugnant, and yet most satisfying film made about late socialism” (190), . It depicts the Soviet Union as a horror show, characterized by the complete absence of morality. Cargo 200 offended many filmgoers, but Norris sees it as the director’s attempt to wean the populace away from Soviet-era tendencies. Other chapters in the book address animated treatments of the Russian past (including an ambitiously drawn feature about the Christianization of Russia) and the creation of the first Slavic fantasy film (Wolfhound [2006]), whose history was entirely fictionalized. In the same vein, the enormously successful films based on the novels...